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Kill Me Tomorrow

Friday, July 16; Creepy Crawl

Somebody was waiting in my office, a silhouette of gray menace barely visible through the frosted windows. MetroPatrol's goons wouldn't be polite about asking a freelancer like me to consider a career change. I burst in like I was raiding the place.

The skeletal creep standing in front of my desk wasn't MetroPatrol. Two ugly forehead scars told a different story: brain-stim addict. Like all volties, he twitched in slow motion, like he was having a seizure underwater, and he was as thin as those starving kids in Arizona. Trouble, sure, but my thumbprint account was thirsty and his credits would spend the same as anybody else's.

Two gulps of absinthe later, we got down to business.

"What do you know about Kill Me Tomorrow?" he croaked.

"Not much. Techno-punks with a nice line in surreal pulp/noir lyrics -- two guys and a dame who paints pictures."

"What if I told you that the woman and the tall man were married?"

"Married, huh?" This city made me want to puke sometimes. "Pretty sick, but there's no law against it."

"And that they were collaborating on a companion novel to their album The Garbageman and the Prostitute?"

"A real renaissance couple. So where do I come in?"

"I want you to follow them and tell me everything. They'll be at the Creepy Crawl this Friday," the voltie groaned. "You see, I desire -- "

I cut him off with a wave of my hand. "Save the confessions for church. Just get my account number right when you transfer the credits." I thought about the fiends and heavies at the Creepy Crawl and reached for the absinthe. Maybe MetroPatrol was right: There had to be an easier way to make a living.